hotel and at Jacob’s request spent the entire night talking with him. Thus
began a lifelong friendship between the Bonns and the Schiffs in spite of
the later rivalry between Schiff’s firm (Kuhn, Loeb) and Bonn’s (Speyer &
Company).^10 After a few months of unemployment, Jacob was hired as a
clerk in the brokerage firm of Frank & Gans. Gans was impressed by the
volume of the clerk’s transactions and his ability to drum up trade, and he
called Schiff “a born millionaire.” Shortly thereafter but still before his
twentieth birthday, Jacob became a partner with Henry Budge and Leo
Lehmann in the brokerage firm of Budge, Schiff & Company. Undeterred
by the fact that Budge’s family firm in Frankfurt enjoyed a less than savory
reputation, Schiff reportedly continued to do well. Nevertheless, the
American firm was short-lived.^11
Schiff owed his achievements to the happy confluence of his personal
ability and the post–Civil War demands of a booming economy. His path
was eased considerably by informal contacts with other Germans, espe-
cially men like Bonn, Budge, and Lehmann, all of whom hailed from
Frankfurt. In the absence of immediate family, those acquaintances became
his primary support group. Although his training in a Frankfurt bank
proved to be an asset, the lack of a higher formal education was of no ac-
count. On the basis of his own experience, Schiff once advised a young man
that a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old who started early in business and
gained experience from the bottom up had an advantage over a college
graduate who entered the business world at the age of twenty or more. For
his own son, however, he followed a different track, permitting Mortimer
to have two years of college before entering the firm. He, the domineering
father, chose Amherst despite his son’s preference for Harvard because it
was smaller and less likely to snare the youth in “the many temptations a
young man is subject to with so many students around.”^12
Schiff found lodging in the West Fifties, then considered Manhattan’s
uptown. Life in a rapidly growing city was doubtless overwhelming for a
relatively sheltered young man who did not speak English. The center of
America’s foreign trade, New York was fast becoming a major industrial
city as well as the hub of the nation’s credit and banking system. Simultane-
ously, it was the magnet attracting tens of thousands of newcomers, both
immigrants and rural Americans, who flocked to new economic frontiers.
To ease the culture shock, most immigrants sought psychological if not ec-
onomic reinforcement from fellow nationals. Schiff joined the company of
German Jews, a group that was proud of its German heritage; its members
held onto their native language in their homes, clubs, and temples for
many years. (Schiff’s letters to his children were also in German.) Unlike
those German immigrants who rose rung by rung on the economic ladder,
Schiff, by virtue of his European banking experience and personal contacts,
was able to move rapidly into established Jewish circles.^13
4 Jacob H. Schiff